Artistic Agony

The Painter and the Wild Swans by Claude Clement (1986) is a story about an artist’s existential struggle. Art is life. Life is art. They coexist in Teiji as a fight for survival as intense as any person’s hunt for food and shelter. Frederic Clement succeeds in painting this synchronicity. Only now, after reading the story and gazing at the pictures several times, do I see swans disguised as snow peaks in the cover art. Teiji is a painter who lives in Japan. “No one could equal him in capturing the beauty of the tiniest shrub, the most delicate grass, or the iris nearly to bloom.” One day, Teiji sees a flock of swans and his life changes. Clement’s paintings capture this change brilliantly. Teiji leaves his successful life, takes only his brushes, paints, and paper, and travels in search of the swans. He wants to paint them. His life and his art become one. The story appears in English and in Japanese. It ends with a poem.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey (2013) reveals the torment that many artists endure. Arthur Miller is quoted, “‘I get up in the morning and I go out to my studio, and I write. And then I tear it up! That’s the routine, really. Then, occasionally, something sticks.”‘ This is a friend’s description of Frederic Chopin: “‘His creation was spontaneous and miraculous . . . it came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to play it to himself. But then began the most heart-rending labour I ever saw. It was a series of efforts, of irresolutions, and of frettings to seize again certain details of the theme he had heard . . . He shut himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing it as many times . . . He spent six weeks over a single page to write it at last as he had noted it down at the very first.’” Margaret Mead was always working. She once was angry that a morning meeting was postponed without her knowledge. “‘Do they realize what use I could have made of this time? Do they know I get up at five o’clock every monrning to write a thousand words before breakfast? . . . Emtpy time stretches forever . . . I can’t bear it.’”

Who knew?